A Buddhist Chinese Glossary by Konrad Meisig and Marion Meisig (review)

Konrad and Marion Meisig have been working with Chinese Buddhist narrative literature for many years, and this glossary is one of the products resulting from previous research (including many translations and glossaries of specific texts) in the field of Buddhist studies. During the last two decades, an abundance of secondary literature on the semantics and syntax of Chinese Buddhist texts has been published, mostly in Chinese and Japanese, but also in Western languages. However, most of the Western publications focus on specific aspects of the Buddhist language, and there is still no comprehensive reference work on Chinese Buddhist translation literature. One reason is certainly the fact that the semantics and syntax of these texts show an enormous degree of complexity and diversity and cover a period of approximately one thousand years. Therefore, this publication is a highly welcomed contribution to the ongoing studies in this field. The overall goal is formulated in the following way: “In its present state, the BCG is not yet a dictionary, but a glossary, containing an approximate number of presently 4,000 lemmata, prepared, however, from a representative selection of texts, preparatory to a future, more comprehensive dictionary” (p. vi). The word list is published and distributed in the form of a PDF file. The publication is divided into two parts, an introduction and the main part, the glossary. In this review, I will give a short overview of the structure of A Buddhist Chinese Glossary (BCG), and focus on the introduction to the word list.

The Introduction

The introduction contains a short discussion concerning some linguistic and literary features of Chinese Buddhist translation literature. In the second part of the Introduction, the features and goals of the BCG are discussed.

The authors start the introduction with a short definition of Buddhist Chinese, which “holds a middle position between Classical Chinese (fifth to third century b.c.) and the Middle Chinese idiom of the third to sixth century a.d., the latter being based on the contemporaneous colloquial language” (p. iii). It is also pointed out that Buddhist Chinese has the features of a translated language (rather than being a representation of a natural language) and that the Chinese used in the translation literature is often heavily influenced by the structural and semantic features of the Indic source languages. Here it should be added that Buddhist Chinese is by no means a uniform language but shows huge differences in terms of diachronic developments, individual translators (or translator teams), and regional varieties. The impact of Indic languages on Buddhist Chinese is a field of research that has been barely touched upon and will occupy historical linguists for decades to come.

In the subsequent pages, the authors list some features of Buddhist Chinese as “religiolect,” defined as a “kind of secret spiritual language.”¹ There is no further explanation why this language should be defined as “secret.” Reflections on the differences between the source and target languages and the features of Buddhist Chinese (especially in the section on “word level” and following) are—from a linguistic standpoint—not transparent and rather confusing. Hopefully they will be reworked in a future version of the BCG.

Terms such as “genuine literary Chinese” appear rather arbitrarily, defined as language “based on Classical Chinese and contemporaneous colloquial Chinese” (p. iv). The term “Classical Chinese” is defined as the language of the fifth to third centuries c.e. The authors also state that “Classical and Middle Chinese, on the other hand, are tonal languages.” However, it is assumed by many scholars dealing with Chinese historical phonology that Classical Chinese did not have tones yet, and that tone development was based on the reduced syllable features of Middle Chinese as opposed to older layers of Chinese (e.g., disappearance of consonant clusters and, especially, based on post-codas of Old Chinese).²

As stated by the authors, the BCG aims at three features (“diachrony,” “verifiability,” and “digitalisation...